PERSPECTIVES: Who was Ivan Mazepa? (10/27/02)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

Who was Ivan Mazepa?

Back in the old Ukrainian SSR, Leonid Kravchuk was in charge of policing ideological purity. In practice, that meant going after people who were too vocal about Ukraine's cultural and political status. No doubt, Mr. Kravchuk's fingerprints were on many an arrest warrant in the relentless campaign against "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism." That's what they called it back then. Carried over from the old Russian Empire, "nationalism" was a catchall crime whose definition changed with the political winds. Regardless, it was a very serious accusation. Under Stalin, "bourgeois nationalists" got a bullet to the back of their heads. What a delicious irony then, that the man responsible for preserving ideological purity turned out to be the biggest heretic of all!

In his 1997 book, Resurrection, the Struggle for a New Russia, reporter David Remnick gives some fascinating background. It was December 7, 1991, a week after Ukrainians had overwhelmingly approved a referendum on independence. Mr. Kravchuk, Ukraine's Communist Party chief, had crafted the language and campaigned vigorously for its passage. Now he was meeting Russia's Boris Yeltsin and Stanislav Shushkevich from Belarus to dissolve the Soviet Union.

That evening at dinner, Mr. Remnick writes, Mr. Yeltsin supposedly got so drunk that he fell out of his chair. Messrs. Kravchuk and Shushkevich were dragging his inebriated body to the couch just as the Russian foreign policy team was entering the room. Mr. Kravchuk greeted them, coolly assumed the chairman's seat and offered up a short speech about how the three countries that founded the USSR in 1922 had decided to end it. Oh, and please try to limit Mr. Yeltsin's alcohol intake in the future, he urged. So much depends on it.

Who would have thought? The ideology chief was a bourgeois nationalist. But then, based on the referendum, so were nine out of 10 Ukrainians.

All this recent history comes to mind because of the stir surrounding, "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa," the 152-minute, $2.3 million movie about an earlier Ukrainian leader who kept his feelings to himself, then turned his back on Moscow when he had the chance. Director Yuri Illienko calls his film a "phantasmagoric dream of history."

The Washington Post describes it as "a circus hall of mirrors in which characters and scenes are twisted, warped, distorted." Variety, the voice of the film industry, gives it thumbs down: "[the director's] indigestible style here dooms what could have been an impressive saga." It acknowledges "moments of strange beauty," but they are offset by "cacophony - an almost amateurish disregard for audience sensibilities." According to The Ukrainian Weekly, many who saw it at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute this summer didn't know what to make of it.

I'm no film critic, so I won't comment on the film as entertainment or art. Instead, I'm interested in it as a political statement, which the director's son explains, asks, "Who was Mazepa and what was his role in Ukrainian history and what is Ukraine's place in Europe and the world?"

Ivan Mazepa (1639-1709), of course, was Ukraine's hetman during the reign of Tsar Peter I. For 22 years he did the tsar's bidding and, as a result, became powerful and wealthy, commanding the affection of beautiful women who were decades younger.

Then, to everyone's astonishment, Mazepa cast his lot with King Charles XII of Sweden when the latter invaded Russia in 1709. It all ended disastrously at the Battle of Poltava, with King Charles seriously wounded and the combined Swedish and Ukrainian forces fleeing into Moldavia [present-day Moldova], where Mazepa died three months later.

Russians went on to honor Peter by adding "the Great" to his name, while Mazepa for them became synonymous with "traitor." Poet Alexander Pushkin's epic poem, Poltava, describes him as "sly," "cruel," "cunning," "cold," "destructive," "wily" and a "snake." In Peter Tchaikovsky's opera, Mazepa, based on Pushkin's epic poem, the basso villain comes across just as Pushkin describes him. In fact, Russians were so upset with Mazepa's brand of treason that the Russian Orthodox Church held an annual ceremony for nearly three centuries where the hetman's soul was condemned to hell.

Ukrainians see Mazepa completely differently; his face is on their national currency and postage stamps, and now there's this movie, generously subsidized by the government. In the film, Mazepa is depicted as a hero, while Peter is a lunatic and a psychopath. Ukraine's leading actor, Bohdan Stupka, plays Mazepa. Stupka, a former minister of culture, was also Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the joint Polish-Ukraine production of Henryk Sienkewycz's classic "With Fire and Sword" and Tevye the milkman in the Ukrainian version of the Shalom Aleichem classic, which is widely known as Fiddler on the Roof.

Although A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa received mixed reviews as entertainment, it seems to work just fine as a political statement. They certainly noticed it in Moscow. The Orthodox Church cast Mazepa into everlasting darkness nearly 300 years ago, and the Russian government repeats the favor today. "The Ministry of Culture believes this film is anti-Russian and turns the known history of Russian-Ukrainian relations on its head and therefore does not recommend that it be shown in Russian theaters," said the ministry. Sigh - as the French would say, the more things change the more they stay the same.

"So who was Mazepa?" the movie asks. Quite simply, Mazepa is the eternal Ukrainian who quietly sizes up his situation relative to Russia and then, to the extent he's forced to, cooperates with Moscow within the framework of whatever the empire allows. Give him half a chance, and he'll opt for independence.

This was the case with Mazepa, and it turned out to be the case with Leonid Kravchuk, a man who was both enforcer of ideological purity for the empire and the father of Ukraine's independence.

Now that's a movie I'd love to see! Imagine the scene where Messrs. Kravchuk and Shushkevich drag a passed-out Mr. Yeltsin onto a couch. (Russians would see it as tragedy; Ukrainians as farce.) Only who plays President Yeltsin? I can't decide between Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. As for Mr. Kravchuk? That's easy: who else but the man who can play both Tevye the Milkman and Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky? I'm thinking of Ivan Mazepa himself, Bohdan Stupka. I bet the Russian Ministry of Culture wouldn't like that movie any better than they like A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa.

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